With the growing use of mobile electronics devices, many systems are being developed to support replicating information contained on an information server, such as an e-mail server or the like, with those mobile devices. In response to a search command, some replication protocols provide that data that has changed state since the previous replication are identified by “change” and “delete” tags, as appropriate. If the data has been deleted since the previous replication, that data is identified with a “delete” tag. For data that has either been added or modified since the previous replication, that data is identified with a “change” tag.
It is important to note that some replication protocols do not provide for an “add” event to indicate that a new object was added. One example of such a protocol is Exchange WebDAV-based replication. However, systems based on other synchronization protocols do support notifications for “add” events in addition to “change” and “delete” events. Such a system will not understand a message which indicates that a “change” should be made to an object that did not already exist. Thus, receiving such a command would result in undesirable behavior in a system that does not understand the “add” event. It would be advantageous to take advantage of “add” notifications even when replicating (also known as “synchronizing”) with systems that do not provided add event notification, such as the DAV protocol.